H9000 with dante stage box; anyone using?

Hi Colin,

I too have recently become part of the H9000 club.  I added a Dante board to mine in preparation for live sound use.  I also added the MADI card for the same reason.
I’ve not yet fired up the Dante board, as I’ve been in and out on tour a bit.

I guess one thing that the Dante board will offer you is an integration with a computer via Dante virtual sound card. For not much investment, you could do quite high channel counts in and out of the H9000 using only a network port.  You may not need to purchase any external hardware to make it work.

<span style=”font-size: inherit;”>It may also be worth checking out Dante Via, There is a combo deal that gets you Via and DVS for around $70. This will let you use existing sound I/o that you have on the same computer or other computers to act as I/o instead of purchasing more hardware.
You could use a sound card on a laptop that you are no longer using as additional remote I/o…. Say at a keyboard station or similar. Leave the H9000 in its rack, and patch a keyboard through it using Dante from across the room using this method? (Or just run some long cables… hahaha)</span>

I’d be keen to hear how you do use the Dante board.  Dante is one of those things that can be used in a lot of different ways, not always in a traditional workflow. You may come up with something I’ve just not even considered!

p

Hiya,

Correct, you need a hardware device to be the clock master. The H9000 Dante board, I am sure, would love to function as the worlds most over qualified Dante clock master.
you could then have any machines on the network use any of the I/o on the H9000. (And not have to use USB…But it’s so easy to USB, I would use that when I could!)

and they can also patch to each other, creating Tie lines as such.  They don’t need to go through the H9000. This is kinda what Dante Via is very useful for.

Food for thought, for sure.

you could do that offloading plug-ins etc.with Dante. It’s perfectly capable of doing that, be aware, it will take some setup.

I have been following a thread of a free product called AudioGridder that seems to have that exact solution rolled out and working very well.

I have not yet used Audio Gridder, But it looks/sounds like exactly what you may want to offload processing. I’d recommend looking at this first. It rolls its own network protocol by the looks of it and I think it gives the gui of the plug-in on the remote machine.   Simple is good, and this is simpler that rolling your own solution. and it’s free??!?

for normal peoples. stop reading here.  Dante slight beginners “Cliff notes” deep dive below the line.

*** not being from the US I hope I referenced Cliff notes correctly there

————————————-

So yes, Dante’s flexible and deep…I hope the following is not too much to digest, But it’s<span style=”font-size: inherit;”> not all plain sailing….A little networking understanding helps a lot to troubleshoot.</span>

a few tips if you decide to have a dip of the toe.  Download the Dante controller (free) as well as the other software you want to try out, be that Via or DVS.  Dante controller is the patch manager and the device manager of the Dante devices on the network.  It doesn’t require either of the Dante softwares I mention above to run.

Dante Controller will also be required to change the sample rate of your DVS sound card. (Command D on mac opens up the popup device manager window).  You can’t do it from the DVS window strangely. A lot of devices operate this way.

Really important, and usually fixes most problems…You’ll need the Dante devices to be at the same sample rate and in the same network subnet to be able to control them and patch them together. If you’ve got a used H9000 Dante board, it may have been setup either as a manual IP or as DHCP. Worth looking into that, as this will be the first place to cause trouble.

Most of the time, we are using our studio computer’s network port for internet and local network traffic, usually this network is also connected to a wifi point. Devices are usually assigned an IP address by DHCP from the wifi router.
So then this brings up the question of do we use this network interface, or do we dedicate a new one to it…

If you are not “multicasting” (splitting the outputs to lots of different machines) whilst not officially recommended, in practise you should be fine to start off with using the same network port.
If you start to send lots of traffic, you could pull some network Jedi Layer 3 blocking trickery and stop the switch or wifi router from transmitting the multicasting or simpler still, dedicate a small network switch to the Dante network and use a different Ethernet interface on your computers and the H9000’s Dante board.
This will usually not have a DHCP router active on it, and as such the devices will just self assign in the 169.254.x.x range and still find each other via bonjour.

To begin with, use only the primary network and forget the secondary network.  Whilst it’s great for bulletproof redundancy, just get it working to start with, and consider that if it becomes mission critical.

there’s a lot of details to consider, But once Dante’s setup and running it’s extremely reliable. We’ve been using this in live sound since the Noughties, and after some scary teething, it’s now very very good.
hope this is not tooooo much to digest.

I need an ice cream now after typing this.

Ha,

Yeah sorry. I was trying to think of the things that annoyed me about Dante when I first started.

That was pretty much the list of it.  It’s very clever tech, almost zero config…sometimes….

Let me know how you get on with Audio Gridder.  I should really have a look, however…. My laptop is so good now.. that I have not even bothered to turn on my Hdx for a year…scary.

Thats’s a brilliant idea. I’d have a look into Audiomovers for the remote audio in and out.  Or Source connect.   There’s definitely a delay,

That and a Team viewer/Screen sharing/google chrome screen sharing thingy connection and you’ll be 97.367% of the way there.

I did a lot of remote audio during the lockdowns.  AudioMovers worked very well.   I saw the source connect remote session running at name 2020, and it was ridiculous. Talk about a clever solution.

Rock on!

Hello,

gavvyt has some excellent suggestions that I would have recommended if they weren’t already posted here. The Dante card is a very flexible addition to your H9000 so I would suggest keeping it and experimenting with some different setups.

One thing that I don’t believe was mentioned is you can get relatively cheap Analog > Dante adapters for adding a few additional inputs or outputs to your H9000, this may be a better option instead of another Dante device for more I/O –  https://www.audinate.com/products/devices/dante-avio

We have about 9 (or 10) various Dante AVIO adapters scattered around our studio, connected to numerous synths and drum machines and such. And yes they literally hang off the back of the gear they are attached to. Ours feed into a Dante ‘star’ network of which the H9k is the master, and centre of the hub. Initially it can take a little head scratching to get the Dante Controller app up and running (it’s like a spreadsheet) but once it’s configured patching gear into other gear is a lot easier and more versatile than a patch bay.

“So this would probably be the way to re-purpose old laptops as VST slaves.”

You won’t need AVIO adapters for computer to computer, you just need to install the Dante Via app on the laptop you want to use and connect it using an ethernet cable to the Dante network. The Dante Controller app will see it as a multi in/out audio interface.

@chriscarter do you have any opinions of the AD/DA quality on those AVIO units?

They sound absolutely fine, never had any issues… the AVIO signal paths are probably a lot cleaner than some of the old gear they are attached to.

This youtube video, talks about the H9000 being a hub of a Dante network – https://youtu.be/lAGE92dJ4y8?si=LunQBxYobj_yeXwh&t=1836

I’ve been toying with Dante or MADI going forward I’m close to maxed out with ADAT options and getting more analog I/O is a good thing.  The video above has me rethinking things, as I was looking at expanding my RME rig, and have thought of the H9000 in similar ways to my KSP8 where it is bussed out of my DAW, but having the H9000 as the main hub has me thinking that there might be another way.

That said, stepping over to MADI or Dante is a big step up in price from a digiface.